Author: Nial Gooding

Using nearly 4.4m onsite records from prospective property buyers in China and cross referencing this data with 620, 000 transactions (collected from 2013~2017) Maggie Hu (et al.) from the Chinese University in Hong Kong set out to see if viewing activity would reveal anything useful about ultimate property-buyer behavior? That people who make site visits […]

From the Economic Research arm of the U.S. Federal Reserve in a ‘FEDS notes’ post from June earlier this year researchers Hunter L. Clark and Anna Wong take a closer look at this important question. The data is problematic for two main reasons. First, it’s clear U.S. importers found a way to massage down the […]

Thomas Piketty, perhaps the world’s most famous living economist (aided here by Li Yang, both of the Paris School of Economics) has turned his attention to the subject of Hong Kong. Specifically, he’s looked at the period from 1981 to the present and notes the significant increase in income and wealth inequality. He further notes […]

[The link here Hedge Fund (Absence of) Performance will take you to the paper direct but if you’re a CFA Charterholder you’ll fine the same in your latest edition of No Life Monthly (P.109) a.k.a. The Financial Analyst’s Journal.] Researchers Nicolas P.B. Bollen, Juha Joenvaara and Mikko Kauppila revisit a now familiar, and proven beyond […]

Chee Keong Low, Associate Professor in Corporate Law at the CUHK Business School in Hong Kong and Tak Hay Low of the University College London have had another look at a case familiar to most Hong Kong investors. [For those not familiar here’s a quick synopsis. China Forestry Holdings listed in Hong Kong in 2009. […]

Thanks to the explanation in the paper highlighted today from Shen Wei and Liyang Hou, both of the Shanghai Jiao Tong University, I now understand why China’s version of a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), or the Digital Currency Electric Payment (DCEP), may be a damp-squib. They point out that Central Banks in general have […]

Zeyu Geng of Shanghai Environment and Energy Exchange; University of Queensland takes us on a tour of where we are now in China in terms of the development of Fuel Cell Heavy Duty Vehicles* (FCHDVs). China is important because where it goes will be where the rest of the world will, most likely, follow. [* […]

With regard to COVID, there’s been a ‘Western’ response very different to China’s approach. In Western democracies there was initially scrambling to establish best practice and even now many voices are heard contributing to a public debate about correct next-steps. China, as we’re now aware, has adopted a more top-down model and these two approaches, […]

Not an academic paper highlighted this week but a feel-good article from the IMF in their Finance and Development series from researchers Benedict Clements, Sanjeev Gupta and Saida Khamidova (the full article is here Military Spending In the Post-Pandemic Era). The authors note military spending, globally, has been in a long term decline with health, […]

Hui Huang at the Department of International Development of King’s College London conducted interviews with platform-based food-delivery drivers in China to get a picture of their lives and working conditions during the pandemic; and that picture was/is not a pretty one. The two largest operators, Meituan Waimai and Ele.me (backed by Tencent and Alibaba respectively) […]

It’s been a mystery for many years, at least to the casual observer, how low ranking Chinese officials manage to get by on their official compensation. No mystery to those, especially businesses, that directly interact with them though. A well established system that implicitly requires “an affectionate reciprocation of our excellent services.” as one cadre […]

Are Chinese companies that choose a U.S-listing, as a group, ‘dodgy’? The collapse of Luckin Coffee and the kind of investigative journalism that turned into what Forbes called “The Most Important Film of 2018”, The China Hustle (watch it here if you haven’t seen it China Hustle), provides ample grist for a mill that concludes […]

[Normally I write a summary; but the author of the piece in focus this week, Mr. John Mueller of the Cato Institute, has prepared such a great one I’d only undermine the many important messages his piece contains if I tried. So, below is his summary in full.] “Policymakers increasingly view China’s rapidly growing wealth […]

First, an aside. The Chinese government have all but declared war on the property market in the last few months as memories of the post-GFC runaway seem to be informing policy making. Not only have they moved to restrict developers’ access to funding they’ve also issued harsh rules for how property developers may progress their […]

Do capital controls work? There’s a long answer to that question with many subjective clauses but the short answer is, nobody really knows. There are so many moving parts to an economy and separating short, medium and long term effects not to mention the highly partisan nature of the question means juries remain out on […]

The scope of work highlighted today from Joanna Bialynicka of the Birula Cracow University of Economics, Poland concludes frustratingly in 2015. Trends identified, and the single most important, though I doubt have changed direction since and, if anything, are likely to have intensified. A summary of the main points: Over the period the volume of […]

I buy chocolate from a vendor in Istanbul. That vendor has to source ingredients like cocoa beans from suppliers outside Turkey in, say, Ghana. The Ghanaians in turn must buy fertilizer from, say, Korea and at every step a different currency is involved. The inefficiencies are obvious and why, in 2021, are we still trading […]

This happened in 2020: the U.S. economy contracted by 3.5% and China’s expanded by 2.3%; and Covid deaths, per million of population, were 300x higher in the U.S. than in China. There’s no debate to be had therefore about which country handled the problem better. Advantage, China. In the paper highlighted today from Yusuke Narita […]